Assessment of Visual Signals Properties for Human-Robot Interactions: Effect of the Signal’s Background on Moving Animations

The increasing involvement of robots in our daily human life and the increasing need for interaction with them in manufacturing induced the appearance of a new generation of robots: collaborative robots or simply "cobots". The integration of cobots in various industries increases the need for Human-Robot Interaction since they are designed to be able to work in close collaboration with the human workforce. To ensure a successful Human-Robot Interaction, an effective communication strategy is required. Our goal is to develop such strategies, by creating contextually appropriate visual signals based on the findings with our online system. In this paper, we will focus on gesture generation for Human-Robot Interactions, to explore the signals that robots can use to make communication more understandable and effective for humans. In this research we tested a hypothesis regarding the background of a moving object type of signal. The results indicate, that the background does not affect the perceived affective state. On the other hand, the color of the moving object does.